


the wind will set me racing

by cosmogony (findingkairos)



Series: we were faster on our feet [2]
Category: Final Fantasy XV, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Child Soldiers, Cor Leonis Whump, Fix-It, Found Family, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Loyalty, Master of Death Harry Potter, Misunderstandings, Phoenix Downs (Final Fantasy), Recovery, Self-Doubt, Temporary Character Death, Whump, killing things for therapy and profit, slow burn found family, the road to hell, the wreckage of a centuries old war
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-29
Updated: 2020-08-06
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:01:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24444748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/findingkairos/pseuds/cosmogony
Summary: The easiest way to win a war is to kill the enemy commander; Ron had showed him that, and so had the Wizarding War. It’s easier said than done in a foreign dimension like this, but it’s still doable.Now if only Cor and Gilgamesh would both stop hovering, Harry would be delighted.(The four years between Cor Leonis stumbling out of the Tempering Grounds alive and being named the Immortal only to vanish from the public eye, and his resurfacing at the side of a young man with very Lucis Caelum features.)
Relationships: Gilgamesh (Final Fantasy XV) & Cor Leonis, Gilgamesh (Final Fantasy XV) & Harry Potter, Harry Potter & Cor Leonis, Harry Potter & Death
Series: we were faster on our feet [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1757932
Comments: 96
Kudos: 641





	1. Year One (M.E. 726)

**Author's Note:**

> ( _more than a place to rest your head_ — [I’ll be homeward bound in time](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=878OTcl6iw8))

Cor had mentioned a war. Cor had not mentioned that he was a reaper on the battlefield, all grace and violence compressed into a too-small body. He was too comfortable with his sword in hand. He was too gracious about it.

Harry watched from where Cor had stashed him, atop a rock that gave him the best visuals of the field, beneath the Protego that Cor had wrangled a solemn promise from him to put up and hold and _keep holding_ no matter what he saw, and wanted to stab something.

The urge was new. Usually he cast spells on his enemies, the silent wordless and sometimes wandless magic that had become a necessity during the war. Knives and blades had never come into it. But Gilgamesh was standing by his side with his own blade drawn, no matter the fact that they were both beneath the Protego, and had taken one look at Harry’s face, and had offered him a knife.

Harry had taken it, because Cor had told him the truth: he had been fighting since he was twelve and now here he was, three years later, a vicious little thing that fought like Harry had once fought. All killing strikes the first time, because he was small and his opponents were grown men and there would not be a second chance.

Cor came back afterwards when the King of Lucis’s army finally arrived, retreating to where Harry stood observing the fight. He was breathing hard and he was bleeding, but his grip was firm on his sword. He wasn’t smiling but his eyes weren’t far away either; they were set on Harry.

Like Luna’s had been, after a particularly bad night. Like Hermione’s. Like Ron’s. Lodestones seeking north.

Harry could not give him absolution. But he could give forgiveness, and shelter, and vengeance. He just prayed that it would be enough.

“What have you been doing since?” Harry had asked, and Cor had answered truthfully but with hesitance, “Working with the hunters.”

And okay, defending the civilians that had slipped the warmonger’s minds. Harry could get behind that. It would do until he had a better understanding of the board, the players, the pieces where they lay.

War was not like chess – there were more important pieces than the traditional lineup. War was more like shogi, or go, or chaturaji. The Empire liked their weird tin man infantry and their tanks. No one had conquered the skies yet.

“How likely,” Harry asked Gilgamesh one night, sitting in the corner of the haven and watching the night for daemons, “do you think it is that the death of the emperor would bring peace?”

Gilgamesh lit one eye and grunted.

“Pretty likely, huh.” Harry cracked his neck and stretched, trying to prioritize. It was hard. He didn’t know the layout of the land, he had never been to Niflheim, and every time he brought up that fact so that he could explain he needed to have been to a place for Apparating to work beyond the risk of splinching, Cor and Gilgamesh shot him down.

Honestly. It was like they didn’t think he’d snuck through an enemy’s camp and occupied territory before.

But there were people _here_ , in more need than a theoretical emperor in need of killing, and some of the Lucian soldiers on the frontlines weren’t much older than Harry. Eighteen, nineteen, twenty and dying. None as young as Cor, but then again none were as gifted with fighting as Cor was.

Hermione would have asked, _Nature or nurture?_ Either way, someone had to pay.

Until Harry had a clear shot at the Royal Family of Lucis to knock them down a few pegs, that someone might as well be the daemons and Niflheim.

People knew that Cor had entered Taelpar Crag. When Harry asked Gilgamesh about it, the spirit admitted that many had challenged him and none had returned – save one. Save Cor.

Even the hunters were calling the boy the Immortal now, because Cor had gone ahead before Harry had been able to put a notice-me-not on him, eager to prove himself useful. He bit his tongue and seethed, trying to keep the sight of his temper away from Cor.

The boy still flinched when Harry failed, and it made him ache, his magic coiling up and crackling through the air, looking for a fight. He poured it into the only thing that was helpful now: notice-me-nots, protections, resistances and tracking and luck. Anything that would stick when Cor insisted on following on the daemon hunts and peeling off on his own to fight the monsters that snuck up on their backs.

The Immortal faded into rumor and myth, a boy with a blade who’d survived Taelpar Crag and then vanished to fight daemons. In his place stood a nameless boy with a sword, accompanied by an equally nameless man with a knife and a hulking suit of armor whose eyes glowed faintly.

 _I’m a soldier of Lucis_ , Cor had said. A soldier. Not a defendant, not a fighter, not a protector. A soldier.

“We’re hunters,” Harry told anyone who asked, and bared his teeth instead of smiling. “We clear out daemon nests.”

He could feel Cor in his shadow tensing, always sweeping the streets with his eyes, always alert, always aware. Harry had not accepted the oath that Gilgamesh had taken him aside to explain, and yet here he was, still behaving as though Harry expected things of him that were not just living and being happy.

Slow steps. Tiny steps. Harry cast his charms and snuck Bombarda and Sectumsempra when Cor’s back was turned, ducked and rolled and came up lunging with hands filled with Fiendfyre. He made bland dinners and dug through his bottomless pack for cookbooks and consulted with Gilgamesh for local herbs.

He tried to keep them out of the eye of the war, and he succeeded. “I didn’t fight a secret war for nothing,” he told Gilgamesh when the spirit looked disgruntled, and bared his teeth again when he made an aborted movement to smack the back of Harry’s head.

He asked just once, over a campfire that they shared with an equally anonymous hunter, “What are they fighting _for_?”

The hunter just laughed, bitter, weary. He stared into the flames when he answered, “Nobody knows. We’ve always been fighting, and we’ve always been losing.”

It was Gilgamesh who had the answer. “They fight,” the spirit said slowly, cautiously, and Harry would have laughed at him for the way he was obviously approaching the wild animal if the wild animal in question wasn’t _him_. “To conquer. For land to rule.”

Not for money. Not for differences between people. Not for beliefs.

For land.

Of all the bloody things to fight about.

Harry was tired, but apparently there was another war to fight. _There will always_ , he could hear Ron saying, _be another war to fight._

He could hear Hermione saying, _Well, maybe there shouldn’t be._

Maybe there shouldn’t be.

Maybe there wouldn’t be, if something or someone brought this ridiculous playground fight over bloody _land_ to a close.

“Is this what you wanted?” Harry asked the night, and by his side Death snorted.

I ASK NOTHING OF YOU, Death said. IT IS NOT MY PLACE.

Bitterness welled up in his throat, coated the back of his tongue. “Why? Because I’m the Master?”

BECAUSE, Death replied, as soft as snow blanketing bones, THIS IS NOT YOUR BURDEN TO BEAR.

Harry folded and scrubbed his hands over his face. Inhaled. Muffled the scream building inside his throat. Exhaled. “No, not mine. But theirs.”

Death said nothing. It did not have to.

“Well.” Harry pressed his fingers to his eyes until his vision went white behind his eyelids, tugged at his hair until he startled himself awake again. “Well. Alright then. Fine. If that’s how we’re playing it.”

He raised his head and glared at Death, raised a finger to point, channeled Hermione at her bossiest. “You better make them miserable.”

Death did not smile, but it certainly relayed the impression of one, and the Cloak of Invisibility was settled around Harry’s shoulders and smoothed of wrinkles by bony hands. OH, YOU CAN COUNT ON THAT.

Cor was up and ready by dawn, by some godawful habit that had been drilled into him.

“Good morning!” Harry said cheerfully, because learned behavior did not disappear overnight or even within weeks; Hermione’s research into human behavior had told them that much at least. “Breakfast?”

Cor always ate quickly, methodically, perfunctorily. As though it was a chore and not a thing to be savored. Harry nursed his glass of water and his plate of eggs and watched Gilgamesh make his rounds for the third time in fifteen minutes, earnestly looking for something that would not be found.

“I don’t understand,” the spirit grumbled at last, and sheathed his sword. Out of the corner of his eye, Harry saw Cor relax – the slightest loosening of his shoulders, the smallest slump over his plate, but there it was. “The daemons were here last night, and then they retreated, and they did not return.”

“Perhaps it was the haven,” Harry said innocently, and took a bite of his egg when Gilgamesh projected the feeling of raising eyebrows at him again.

The Cloak of Invisibility only hid him from sight, but even that was enough. Upwind and walking on air by Locomotor, those below were vulnerable to an ambush via magical bombardment that took out everything within range. Even daemons.

Especially daemons, if it was paired with a Patronus to walk through their numbers. And wasn’t that interesting?

“Where to today?” Harry asked when Gilgamesh had stared at him long enough for him to clear his plate. Cor watched the show, attention shifting from one to the other, wary like a street cat about who he should be watching for the next move from.

Gilgamesh grumbled in lieu of an answer. Funnily enough it sounded like a storm, low thunder and the promise of rain. Hmm. Death had dodged his questions about what, exactly, was letting the spirit stay on the mortal plane. Was it an artifact of this dimension? Was it the Resurrection Stone that Harry had hidden on a necklace chain beneath his shirt?

“The Headquarters of the Hunters,” Gilgamesh said at last, staring into the horizon. “If you are serious about your claims that we are hunters.”

We, not you. Gilgamesh had followed them out of the Crag because he was insistent that he had more to teach Cor, but Harry didn’t need Death as a translator for this.

“Not until I know how to fight without magic,” Harry replied, and set aside his breakfast. Cor was too well-trained (and oh, another sin to pile onto the shoulders of the Lucis Caelum) for his eyes to widen, but he had a white-knuckled grip on his fork. Harry offered him a smile and stretched to loosen up his shoulders. “Knives are new to me – usually I work with swords – but it can’t hurt to learn.”

Afterwards, it was Cor who refused to let Harry use his magic to heal his own bruises, instead pouring the field potions that he’d made overnight over his arms with trembling hands. “You didn’t need to do that,” Cor said, taking the words right out of Harry’s mouth.

But there was tension, and there was concern, and beneath all of that: fear. For what? For Harry?

“I really did,” Harry said as gently as he could, and freed one hand from Cor’s desperate grasp to reel in the boy for a hug.

And then Cor said into Harry’s shoulder, “That’s what you have me for,” and hell. Bloody hell.

Gilgamesh had assured him it was probably a bad idea to go after the Lucis Caelums at this juncture of the war, but Fiendfyre take it all, as soon as he got his hands on them Harry was going to rip them a new one.

“We can use our real names for the hunter’s dog tags,” Cor said, but he’d clenched his hands and had slightly bent knees, prepared to duck or run at the merest raise of a hand.

And even if Cor hadn’t reacted that way, like hell they were going to leave a paper trail for the Lucis Caelums to follow. Harry wanted nothing to do with royalty still, and that meant they were going to take every precaution to stay under the radar.

“Harry and Cor are common enough names.” Harry ruffled the boy’s hair and smiled when Cor scowled but didn’t duck away. He remembered enough of Fred and George for this, at least. “So we’ll keep ‘em. Any preference on the last name?”

“Not really,” Cor replied immediately. Tension was singing down his spine, and Harry’s was twinging in sympathetic pain, but there was nothing to do but to let Cor let go of it on his own.

Harry turned to look at Gilgamesh, but the spirit was shaking his head. “I no longer remember my family name,” he admitted. Right, Death had said the ghost haunting the Tempering Grounds was old. “And I have no need for dog tags.”

“Nonsense,” Harry said cheerfully. “You’re getting one too, no buts.”

Ron had always been a little bitter about his large family, as the sixth of the Weasley children to go to Hogwarts. _Everyone expects me to do as well as the others,_ he’d told Harry once. _But if I do, it's no big deal, because they did it first._

And they had always been a trio – a triptych, Hermione had been fond of calling them.

Granger was a bastardization of the Anglo-Norman and Old French term, she’d said once. If Harry was remembered right, it was derived from granicarius, which in turn was derived from–

“Granica,” Harry decided, and nodded to Cor. “You’re my little brother, Cor. Gil over there is the uncle we followed from – what’s the most remote place you’ve got here?”

“Accordo,” Cor answered promptly, and scowled. “It’s Niflheim territory, and Prince Regis withdrew from negotiations with Accordo when King Mors moved back the Wall and ceded the outer regions of Lucis.”

“Accordo, then.” Glamours and notice-me-nots would be easy enough to maintain; the war had required many things, one of which was finding ways to get the greatest effect out of the least amounts of magic spent. “And nothing like hunting daemons to get in some family bonding!”

Gilgamesh gave him a Look, but Cor was smiling up at him, honest excitement, a little relief. And Harry had fought a secret war. He could afford to be patient, to keep his head and make a list.

Unseen and unheard at the back of the group as they walked into the Hunter’s Headquarters, Death snickered, and when nobody was looking Harry gave it the stink-eye. True to the personality it had taken up around him, Death bowed in response. A TWO-PRONGED APPROACH, it whispered.

Harry snorted at the pun and shook his head, but he smiled, despite himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ron's comment about his family is an actual thing he says in the books, in _Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone_.


	2. Year Two (M.E. 727)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two steps forward, one step back. Recovery isn’t always a straight line, but they’re getting there, in between the wreckage of the war.

“That’ll be twelve hundred gil.”

Harry handed the money over without much protest. His field potions might be good enough to replicate the potions and hi-potions of Eos, but he couldn’t restore magic with more magic. Cor glared at the shopkeep, evidently of the opinion that it was too expensive, but such were the prices at Meldacio.

“D’ya want a phoenix down with that?” the shopkeep asked before Harry could turn away. She had a scar curving up beneath her cheekbone, running down the side of her face and twisting her lip. She was as hunter as they came, Harry remembered; Meldacio took care of its own. She smiled when he tilted his head, and it was genuine. “You’ve survived a year without any, Granica, but luck runs out.”

Luck never ran out when Harry was casting the Sanskrit charm that Hermione had found in one of her late-night frantic research sessions, but the shopkeep was right. His field-potions and healing charms could only do so much in an extended fight. Probabilistically, it was only a matter of time.

Harry was the Master of Death. Gil was a spirit. The only person in the group who would ever need one was Cor, and the boy knew it. It didn’t stop him from glaring at Harry like that would stop him from spending money that Cor thought was too much.

“I’ll take two,” he said, and forked over the gil before Cor could drag them both out of the store.

The tin can men – magitek infantry, Cor tried to get him to say, but where was the fun in that? – had been fielded for the last three years by the Niffs as their primary fighters. People had all sorts of theories about what it was under the mask, because the way they got up and kept fighting was nothing short of unnatural, but no one had ever been able to take one alive to see.

The entire point was that they kept their heads down and let the war grind on until Harry could slip his overprotective minders and bring it to an end. He could afford to stop and dawdle and check for what, exactly, it was that the Empire was using.

Gil and Cor had wizened up to his ways in the last year, though. They hardly let him out of sight, one always staying up to keep watch even in the havens. They said it was for daemons but really it was for Harry, and all three of them knew it even if none of them talked about it.

Well, fine. Two could play at that game. Harry waited until it was Gil’s turn for the watch, pulled the blanket up to Cor’s chin and ensured that the boy was using the pillow like he was meant to be and not sleeping on the cold dirt again because he was leaving it for Harry, of all people, and set up a Protego and a charm around the haven.

“I’m going hunting,” he told Gil, and walked over the haven’s boundaries. He didn’t need to look back to know that the spirit was behind him, one pace back and two to the left, as he was wont to do. Cor took the right while Gil took the left, and it was funny, it _was_ , except it was sad also because Ron wasn’t here to rib him about him and Hermione wasn’t here to pick their brains about history and politics and magic.

It was easy enough to find magitek troopers now that he knew the land. There were empire outposts all over the place, large ones that were military bases for their sniping attacks and raids, with smaller checkpoints interspersed in the land they’d conquered and held. Harry picked a roaming patrol at random and followed them at a distance. He didn’t need night vision goggles when magic did the trick, and he was the Master of Death and Gilgamesh was, no matter that he pretended otherwise when in polite company, a spirit.

They dropped in silence and they worked in silence, and when it was done Harry was left kneeling by a single magitek trooper that Gil was keeping pinned down with a sword.

Attempting to remove the mask did nothing. Attempting to remove the helmet did something, and black mist bellowed out from the trooper, and Harry had cast the Patronus charm and the stag was pawing at the ground and itching for a fight before he realized that it was not a Dementor.

The thing inside the metal suit with the glowing eyes was not a Dementor.

Neither was it a person, and it dissolved into ash and dust, red lightning crackling in its wake.

“Bloody _hell_ ,” Harry hissed, and tried to even his breathing. Everyone had known that troopers dissolved like daemons did, but he’d never been close enough to feel the corruption around it; Cor had been fairly fanatic about keeping him away from the Niff troops.

Well, the cat was out of the bag now. They were basically daemons, if person-shaped, and Harry had seen too many things in the Wizarding War and made war plans with Ron and Hermione too many times to not pursue all theories to the inevitable end.

So. First theory was that they were stuffing daemons into metal suits of armor. Possible, if hard to do. It would explain the sudden surge of tin can men but the lack of Niff citizens complaining about a military draft. It would also explain why no one, not a single one of the hunters or the Crownsguard whose communications they’d been listening in on, had heard them _talk_.

The second theory had to do with the fact that the tin can men fought like humans. A daemon would use its teeth and claws and limbs; nothing was below its dignity because it didn’t have any. Humans used weapons and their hands and feet. Maybe it was humans being given daemonic powers, which backfired upon death.

Harry had a sudden pang of _if Hermione were here_ before he set aside the thought. Hermione was not here, and neither was Ron, and the both of them were safe and beyond a second war. He missed them and their laughter and their wit and their sharp eye like he missed a limb, but he could not ask this of them.

“Gil,” Harry said into the night, and in a flash the spirit was standing next to him. Harry ignored him to search out the Protego he’d cast over the haven and the Intruder Charm, which thankfully hadn’t gone off in either direction. Cor was still asleep then. Good.

The place where they were going was spoken of with pride by the Imperial human troops, and any place like that was no place for a kid.

“We’re going to dig up some information about this First Magitek Production Facility,” Harry said, and dared Gil to disagree.

“What are you hoping to find?” the spirit asked instead. He didn’t ask why or tried to talk him out of it. Just solid acceptance of the field decision that Harry had made.

And as tired as he was of war, of command, he was thankful for it.

The Wizarding War and the things he’d done – the things the Death Eaters and Voldemort sympathizers had done – still kept him up at night. More often than not he slept late and woke up early, tense and with a scream caught between his teeth.

And yet. This was worse.

Harry didn’t care that he was pacing, that he was doing this in full view of spirit and mortal. “Why here, Death? Of all the worlds that you could have found and been ironically pleased with, why _this one_?” This one which was like a cracked-mirror image of his own, down to the sixteen-year-old boy too young to know death, too old to not fight, and Death Eaters replaced by people cursed into monsters.

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO SAVE ANYONE, Death pointed out, as calm as the depths of the sea. All that pressure that knew there was nowhere else to go. NO ONE, EXCEPT YOURSELF.

“And let _this_ pass me by?” Harry snarled. Magic crackled beneath is skin, surged up and outward, fire that was waiting to be unleashed. “Why _here_ , Death? I’ve done the savior thing once. I’m not doing it again.”

SAVIOR OF WHOM? Death asked. YOU FOUGHT THOSE EQUAL TO YOU IN THE LAST REALM, BUT HERE? WHERE ALL WHO LIVE AND DIE DO SO BY THE BLADE, SAVE FOR A FEW? YOU, MY DEAR, HAVE AN UNFAIR ADVANTAGE.

He couldn’t help it; he snorted, ugly and loud. “What, magic?”

NO, Death said, and smiled. ME.

That was fair. There were no artifacts here to curse someone to immortality – even Gilgamesh was a shade of the mortal self, a husk and an outline that looked like a man but was yet smoke and mirrors on the inside. Harry didn’t need to see beneath the helmet to know that there was a reason Gilgamesh never took it off.

The only one who fled Death was not doing so of their own volition; he could feel that too, at least. No, they had escaped the reaches of mortality by consequence, not by meaningful act, and in that sliver of difference there was a world.

“I have you,” Harry said, and this time it was not a burden. It was a promise. No matter what happened, no matter how the Deathly Hallows would affect his life hereafter, he at least had a companion who could have been the death – ha – of him, but who was instead a great conversationalist.

Harry would still be tripping over that if he couldn’t practically hear Hermione’s voice in his head, scolding him for being ungrateful for having friends.

Death tilted its head and stepped back. Harry took the cue and turned around to see Cor, dressed and armed and ready. A year of living as a hunter and on the road hadn’t helped with easing off the pressure of military-strict readiness. “What is it?” he asked, even though the sun had not yet risen, and his voice was hard.

“Nothing,” Harry said, except Cor’s face shut down, became blank, adopted a decidedly military bearing. Bloody hell, he was messing this up. “I mean, no. It’s something. But we’re not touching it with a ten-foot pole until I have a better idea of how to take care of it.”

“What is it?” Cor asked, except he bit his lip at the end of it, like he was trying to stop from finishing that sentence with ‘Sir.’ At least they hadn’t backslid that far yet.

But to tell Cor that he had been killing clones, mutilated humans, children who’d undergone accelerated growth in those times he’d been made Lucis’s weapon and its bloody sword on the frontlines – that would break him.

“Verstael Besithia,” Harry said instead. Compartmentalize. He could explain the sensitive information in full when it hadn’t been just a few months since they’d gotten Cor to grin and not just bare his teeth. “The Empire’s rising military star.”

Too late. “I could infiltrate their lines,” Cor said, voice brisk and professional. “In and out, three weeks, max.”

One week to find Besithia, one week to hitch a ride and case the place, one week to execute and hightail it. Harry could follow the calculations that Cor was making. It was doable. A military prodigy like Cor Leonis could do it.

But the boy standing in front of him was not Cor Leonis. “Absolutely not,” Harry bit out, and turned on his heel. “We’ve talked about this, Cor.”

“You bought two phoenix downs, I’ll be fine,” Cor said to his back, and no. No. Cor did not just say that. But the expression on his face – the _lack_ of expression on his face – when Harry whipped back around said yes, Cor had just said that, and in full confidence.

“I did not buy the phoenix down because I want you to go off on a _suicide mission_ ,” Harry hissed. He did not struggle to keep himself where he was, because this was not his first rodeo. This was not his first time arguing someone out of a stupid plan, let alone Cor, and this might be backsliding but they hadn’t fully regressed either. Not yet at least. “I bought them so that we can keep you _alive_.”

“You wouldn’t mention Besithia if it weren’t important to the war.” Cor’s voice was even, blank, empty. “I’ve seen the way you look at them, at the other hunters, at the civilians under Niflheim’s thumb. It’ll be easy.”

Easy for a child who’d grown up knowing nothing but how good he was at killing. “If anyone is killing Besithia it’s me, and _you_ are doing nothing to draw the Empire’s attention to you.” He did not say the rest, because it wasn’t Cor who was running from the Lucis Caelums, no matter the fact that he _should_. It was Harry who didn’t want anything to do with them. “And anyway, it’s a long-term project. I’m not going to go off chasing him right this moment. We still need to clear out the bounty on the giant snakes.”

“The midgardsormr,” Cor replied automatically, the same as he always did when he was correcting whatever lapse in knowledge he has of Eos. “But you want to end the war.”

“Everyone wants to end the war.” Harry let go of the magic he’d unwittingly gathered in his anger and resettled himself on his feet. “But there’s a reason the war’s been going on for a while. We gotta do it right, else someone is going to always be trying to bring it back.”

That had been one lesson learned with the Wizarding War, at least. There would always be dissenters and protesters for either side, one to snag a victory from the jaws of death, the other with warmongers who’d forgotten in their violence and their hatred just what it was they were fighting for. Even in a ridiculous war over bloody _land_ , he did not doubt that there would be people on either side baying for blood and the return of hostilities in the name of revenge or pride or honor.

Cor didn’t look too convinced of that, but he had no leg to stand on, he wasn’t yet convinced of the importance of his self-preservation. He followed in Harry’s wake, one pace back and two to the right, still tense. That wasn’t what Harry was going for.

Woodworking was one of the hobbies from the war, when wood and knives and time had been one of the few things in abundance when they couldn’t use magic, and one of the things he’d introduced to Cor. Maybe he could bring it up again, try and settle them both with something to do with their hands.

They had a reputation as Lucian hunters, but Leide and Duscae and Cleigne were now Niflheim territory. The military bases kept tabs on the hunters that passed through their boundaries.

Well. They _had_ kept tabs. Two of the bases were kind of in disarray right now, missing food and clean water and ammunition, among the other smaller comforts that their very human officers who commanded the magitek infantry relied on.

Harry snickered as he dropped off the seventh crate of supplies at the fourth Hunter’s outpost. Really, there was more than one way to wage a war, and supplies had to come from somewhere. In the no man’s land where the war had drawn very stark lines between countries, farming produce was always under threat of confiscation.

“Walk slowly, softly,” he told a curious Cor, “and carry a big stick.” The last got him to smile at least, and Harry smiled back reflexively, tried to communicate that yes, he wanted Cor smiling, he was doing it too so it was appropriate for Cor to be doing it.

“Instead of daemons, we’re hunting Imperials.” Cor snorted. “Fucking finally. Even the daemons get boring eventually.”

“Heresy,” Harry cried, and put his hands over Cor’s ears. “Who’s been teaching you such things? Let me at ‘em, I’ll teach ‘em what it is to mess with my little brother!”

Cor didn’t knock his hands away at least. He was tense, but he was loosening up with every passing hour that Harry proved to him that he wasn’t angry.

The fight at the third big Imperial base of Duscae improved his mood, for a given definition of improve. He wasn’t stashing Harry on some distant rock anymore, now that Gil had declared him passable with knives and outright approved of his sword work.

And Cor was right, anyway. Daemons were easy. Harry raised the Protego and bundled Cor under his arm, raised his other and thought of quiet campfires, sunsets over the greens of Cleigne, startled laughter like songbirds roused from nests, Gil adding more food to Cor’s plate when he thought the kid wasn’t looking and doing the same thing to Harry when he thought _Harry_ was distracted.

His Patronus made short work of daemons. It was humans that were harder, who he couldn’t just swing magic at because they would carry word back of a stranger on the battlefield who wielded magic. A stranger claimed by neither the magical bloodline of Lucis Caelum nor of Nox Fleuret.

It was the humans that got under their guard, staggered Harry beneath gunfire heavy enough to sneak Protego behind his tiny piece of cover.

Gil was distracted. Harry had seen the sneak attack coming and was readying himself to Apparate. Cor came out of nowhere and threw himself between them, and human Imperial infantry shot Cor point-blank in the chest.

Harry slammed two field-potions into Cor and came up swinging, swapping out his knives for the sword that was the closest thing he could find to Gryffindor’s. He skewered both troopers and yanked out the blade before he could confirm the kill. But he was out of cover now, and the rest of that squad had guns.

Gil was done with his crowd. Harry ducked and ran, swapped the sword for the knives, and cheated a little with a muttered Trip Jinx.

There was more gunfire. Harry ducked before he realized it wasn’t meant for him. Gil’s glamour made him look human but he was a spirit; bullets would hurt but not kill him.

Someone wheezed, breathing faintly. Young, wounded. _Fiendfyre_ , Harry thought, and it came to him eagerly, red and violent and as thirsty for blood as it was for oxygen.

He set it free and turned around, and Gil looked up from where he was kneeling by a slumped-over Cor. He nodded.

Harry turned back to the rest of the fight. The Imperial base was burning in the background, regular fire and Fiendfyre mixing until it was a husk and a charred shell. The sight of that and the sight of their fallen comrades made the Imperial human infantry who’d arrived as backup hesitate.

“I give you one chance,” he said, bringing their attention to himself instead of the fallen boy and the older man hovering over him. “Turn around and leave.”

They raised their weapons. A fatal mistake. Harry carved through them, didn’t let himself think about what he was doing, stared until the world drilled down to stroke and parry and jinx and twist and curse. He had warned them. He could not afford to slow down or stop.

Afterwards, Harry straightened and turned, and saw Death close. Too close. Too dark and solid.

HE IS CLOSE, it said, and Harry Apparated to them between one step and the next. Gil was a spirit, he couldn’t die, not unless whatever kept him here was exorcised or destroyed.

But Cor was mortal, and human, and bleeding. “What about the potions?” Harry asked, and he was clenching his hands but his voice still shook.

Gil shook his head. “This came after,” he said. This, meaning the wound that Gil was pressing both hands over, keeping the great gut wound closed.

Harry swallowed hard, reached out into his bottomless waist pouches, but he kept precise track of supplies at all times. “I’m out.” He’d used the last hi-potion on a hunter just a few hours ago, and had snuck the rest of his potions into the last civilian’s crate, mixed with loot from the Imperials.

HE IS TOO CLOSE, Death said. Its voice was kind. Its voice was always kind.

“No. _No_.” It took him a moment to realize the unholy sound had come from him, but Harry was too busy digging for the last of the medical supplies. The ones he’d never used because Cor had been careful, _all_ of them had been careful.

Until now. Until Cor had gone into the fight less than easy, had gone into it looking to bleed.

Harry ignored the stillness of Cor’s ribcage and pressed the phoenix down into his – small, too small – hand and made him crush it.

And waited.

And waited.

And waited, until Cor’s body arched off the ground and caught fire, and Harry breathed in the sweet clean scent of phoenix smoke.

He couldn’t stay here, looking down at what could have been Cor’s body, too much of his own blood spilled onto his clothes and the Duscae wetlands.

“We need to move,” he bit out, and didn’t wait to see if Gil had followed before he walked away.

He didn’t get the full story of how Cor had died until later. The two field-potions had worked as they’d been intended, brought him back up to fighting form, only for him to spot a sniper lining up a shot. They’d aimed and fired at Gil, who’d staggered, his human-glamour going so far as to make him bleed before the trooper had reloaded and aimed at Harry.

Harry, who’d been throwing Fiendfyre around like it were fireworks and thus too distracted by his own fight to hear Cor yelling for him to duck.

“He did what was right,” Gil told him as Cor stood out of hearing range. Harry could not make himself look at him, standing at parade rest and his chin up and his face empty, still wearing the clothes he’d died in.

He looked at Gil instead, whose glamour had fallen as soon as they’d gotten back to their camp and its protections, and the words coming out of the spirit’s mouth lined up perfectly with what he was saying. Blank, empty, professional.

“Death follows me like a friend,” Harry hissed, because Gil was a spirit and he’d been there also when Death had first made its appearance at the Tempering Grounds to explain away Harry’s presence. “I wouldn’t have died.”

“You don’t know that,” Gil replied. He did not do Harry the discourtesy of sounding kind. “For all we know you’re just as mortal as the boy is.”

“That doesn’t mean he should die for me!”

“And what,” the First Shield said, “did you think the Retinue’s Oath meant?”

Harry cut his hand through the air in agitation, sparks following in its wake. “There is a reason I told him I would not accept until he was eighteen.”

“It only means it’s not official. It doesn’t change his responsibilities.”

“He’s a sixteen-year-old! He _has_ no responsibilities to save my life!”

Gilgamesh tilted his head. “You were only sixteen years old. An age as fine as any to give your life for a noble cause – or for a person.”

Harry had nothing to say to that.

“Sir,” Cor said into the silence, and Harry flinched. Cor pressed on as if he hadn’t noticed. “I don’t regret it.”

Harry was utter shite at this. Harry was a war general and a fighter and a wizard, he couldn’t be trusted with children. This entire affair had been a terrible idea. Cor should be in the city with a steady roof over his head and adult supervision and support, not out in the wilds following a bloody idiot who didn’t know what he was doing in this dimension half the time.

A bloody idiot who couldn’t stop him from getting killed.

“It was my decision to go ahead and raid the Duscae base too,” Harry pointed out, in case Cor had forgotten. “Even though we should have waited a day. I got too eager.”

But the boy was immovable. “I don’t regret it,” he said again. “And if you were too eager, Sir, then I was chomping at the bit. It’s not your fault.”

“Drop the ‘Sir,’” was all Harry could choke out. The rest – was fair. Time and age and the implacable teacher called experience had taught him that Cor was right. Blame did not always lie with him.

But oh, it felt like it did. It would only be right if it did.

No matter the bloody way they’d gone about doing it, they’d accomplished their goal. All of the outer regions of Lucis knew who the hunters with the last name Granica were. Descriptions of them varied wildly, as notice-me-not charms wore off when the actions became ludicrous enough to slip the suspension of disbelief.

But the civilians loved them enough that they kept their secrets and guarded their folk heroes jealously. Small mercies in such a clusterfuck, to borrow another Lucian term.

It was enough to hide them as they kept their head down, while Harry buried his temper and Cor convinced himself of their safety and Gil juggled being the only sane adult in the vicinity with the fact that they were still hunters.

“I know what you’ve been thinking,” Gil told Harry one night, when Cor was prying his eyes open with caffeine and bone-deep tension. “Don’t.”

The people here loved them. They knew Cor Granica, and more importantly they knew Harry Granica. He’d saved enough gil and had enough in raw gold from the Wizarding War to leave Cor and his foster family in comfort, even during wartime. The idea had been running around in his head all day and he couldn’t set it aside.

Harry couldn’t look at Gil – could only see Cor, staring into the night, having wrangled night watch duty from Harry by the virtue of having backslid so far back that if he wasn’t given things to do he would look for ways to make himself useful, i.e. go kill things – when he asked, “What if this isn’t what he needs?”

“What he needs is to not be abandoned by his lord again,” Gilgamesh said. These bloody idiots with their lords and their oaths. “More importantly, he needs to believe that this is permanent.”

That startled him into turning his stare to Gilgamesh. “What part of _you’re my little brother_ comes across as not permanent?”

The spirit shrugged. “It’s a long road.”

“I shared Hermione’s family name with him. I taught him woodcarving!”

“Then find something else to share with him. Something that will convince him.”

Easier said than done. But then again Harry could provide adult supervision, and unquestioning support, and all-day hunts when they both needed to blow off some steam. Surely there was something else that he was missing. What did the civilians with good, happy lives and good, happy parenting have that he didn’t?

And then it hit him.

“I kind of want a house.”

Cor made an inquiring sort of noise in the back of his throat but didn’t look up from whatever it was he was doing. Harry kicked him gently in the knee, but no dice.

He continued anyway. “I was cheated out of a retirement in a nice Scottish villa, okay. I want the rolling fields, the gentle breeze, the bright sun – all of it.”

“A house where?” Cor asked. He still didn’t look up. But it was an answer, so Harry would count that as a success. Right now, he would consider _any_ response that wasn’t just ‘yes, Sir’ or ‘no, Sir’ a success.

Even if he had to actually consider what he knew of the geography. “Hmm. Cape Caem would be good for something seaside, but I want to teach you how to garden, so something more inland would be nice.”

Cor’s hands stopped on what he was doing. Harry kept an eye on that in his peripheral. “We can’t do that at the Cape?” Cor asked at last.

“A master gardener told me once that plants who do well by the sea don’t necessarily do well further inland, and vice versa. Something about the salt content in the air.” Neville wasn’t here to complain about Harry overstating his expertise, ha. Really, what did the man think? That Harry _wouldn’t_ brag about his friends any chance he got?

“Cleigne would be the best choice,” Cor offered hesitantly.

“Mm. Good thing we kicked those Niffs out of Cleigne, isn’t it?” Harry offered him a bright smile and was vindicated to see Cor shyly returning it. “Or we could do Tenebrae! Their flowers look pretty.”

“What,” Gil grumbled as he returned from his hunt, “are you two talking about?”

“Real estate!” Harry channeled Fred and George at their most cheerful, rolled so that he could pin Cor down, and started to scrub at his hair. It was finally starting to grow out from its military-short length, now that Cor had stopped taking a knife to it every time it got long enough to get in his eyes – better to fight, he’d said then, but he’d stopped doing it recently. Harry was hopeful.

Gil grunted and ignored Cor’s hissing. “In Tenebrae?”

“Or Cleigne,” Cor bit out, and finally elbowed Harry to slip his teasing. Thank Merlin, finally. He wasn’t used to being physically affectionate, the same way Cor wasn’t used to being able to stop someone he thought was superior from doing whatever they wanted with him. Gil was staring at them both but kept his hands to himself. At least there was confidence from that quarter. “Cleigne would be safer. Tenebrae is still Niff territory.”

“For now!” Harry pointed out and grinned at Gil’s glare. “Hey, I’m just saying. I’m killing the Emperor of Niflheim anyway, so it’s only a matter of time.”

Both Cor and Gil flinched, the same as they ever did when Harry brought up the fact that yes, he was planning murder, and yes, he was going to follow through with it. Gil recovered faster and pointed the dressing knife at him, ignoring Cor’s hissing at the brandished weapon. “Not until the security relaxes.”

Harry snorted. “No promises.” If the opportunity arose, he would be taking it.

Silence descended upon the camp, as Gil dressed and cooked dinner and Cor returned to whatever it was that he’d been doing and Harry stared at the sunset and shuffled through plans one through fourteen to end the war.

He was just planning number fifteen, using transfigured predator animals that had no equivalent here in Eos to make it look like it was divine intervention that killed off Aldercapt, when someone coughed. Harry was sitting up and looking around, hand reaching for his wand, before he recognized that it was no longer winter and that wasn’t the cough of someone hacking up their lungs. It was Cor instead who was kneeling next to him, who wouldn’t look at him in the eye.

Cor had kept safe whatever it had been in his hands when Harry had started to tease him, but he presented it now, two palms outstretched and flat like an offering. It was a wood carving; the only thing graceful about it was the neck and feather etching. The rest was blocky and weirdly angled, with much of the details of the beak and claws lost. But obvious care had gone into the whole of it, and Cor’s fingers trembled around it.

Harry did not say _You shouldn’t have_. Instead he dug up the softest smile in his arsenal and ignored the heartburn when he cupped Cor’s hands with his own so that they were both holding the wooden phoenix.

“Don’t ever make me revive you again,” Harry whispered, and freed one hand to pull Cor hug in for a hug.

Silence. Then, mumbled into his shoulder: “I trust you.”

Harry let it choke his lungs and clutch at his heart. He let himself savor the warmth in his chest. Nevertheless he had to set it aside when Cor continued, “So I guess we’re getting a house in Cleigne?”

“Yes.” If that was what it took. And who knew? Maybe it would come out cheaper in the long run, to buy a house and live in it rather than sleep at havens spring through fall and rent the caravans in winter.

Actually, it probably would. Another point against him on the ‘Harry was a terrible adult’ front. But he could feel Cor smiling into his shoulder, so maybe he was doing _something_ right.


	3. Year Three (M.E. 728)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harry accidentally maybe-sort-of takes over a town. Or two. Or five. The new gaggle of kids that he’s accidentally maybe-sort-of adopted don’t help.

There was a new cashier at Verinas Mart.

“We need the medicines,” he reminded Cor, who nodded stiltedly, eyes still stuck to the man behind the counter and his hand on his katana. Ah, hell.

Harry nodded to Gil who obligingly stepped forward to complete the transaction, and instead tugged Cor by the elbow to a quiet corner. Cor didn’t protest, which was evidence enough of how far gone he was. Damn it.

They stood there breathing for a few long moments, listening to Gil grunt and answer in very small sentences. “What’s going through your mind, Cor?” Harry asked eventually.

“He’s Crownsguard,” Cor muttered. “Not anymore, discharged for injury, but what’s he doing _here_?”

Harry flicked out his magic automatically, but nothing snagged. Their glamours were holding, and as far as Auburnbrie and the Hunters were concerned, they had no ties with the Crownsguard or with Insomnia. He still tucked Cor under his arm and pressed more strength into the notice-me-not, until they all but disappeared from awareness.

“Oh? Where did your nephews go?” the cashier asked as they passed him by. Cor was watching everyone and everything with wide eyes now, pressed close to Harry’s side – at least he hadn’t backslid that far.

“Must’ve found something shiny and followed it,” Gil sighed, right on cue. “Thanks, man. Now you take care, alright?”

The cashier’s “You know it!” followed him out. Gil looked around, his pack slung over one shoulder, the picture of a weary old man in hunter’s garb instead of a spirit animating what was basically a suit of armor. Harry flicked out his magic, let it snag on Gil’s elbow too. Gilgamesh was too good to startle visibly, but he followed the tugging until he was back at their camp.

“It’s always hilarious to see you imitating us young ones,” Harry told Gil. “We need to talk to Auntie Mae.”

Gil didn’t question him. “She should be home about now.”

No one talked about the fact that apparently Harry looked a lot like a green-eyed Regis Lucis Caelum, which he was thankful for. They gave him looks and they asked Cor quiet questions when they thought Harry wasn’t watching, but they never said anything to his actual face.

Although that might be the fact that Harry was basically running another Hunter’s outpost out of the house, providing his field-potions and food and shelter and the occasional backup.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Auntie Mae grumbled as she puttered around her house for snacks, a smile on her face for the amount of butter that Harry had brought regardless of the wartime rationing, “that brood of yours loves you.”

“I think love might be taking it too far,” Harry countered. He kept an eye on Cor, who was bundled under two blankets and the awfully knitted hat that Harry had made when he was first starting out. He could make much better hats now, not to mention scarves and gloves, but Cor had practically hissed at him the one time Harry had tried to take it back so he could fix up the snarled stitching. “Anyway. Is the cashier at the general store new?”

“Oh, very new. Came in just last week and started working for the old gran. Why, Harry?” Auntie Mae looked up from her plate of cookies to stare him dead in the eye. “Do we need to get rid of him?”

He was touched, he really was, but it was sort of unsettling to see someone who looked like an older Profesor McGonagall ask him, very earnestly, if he needed someone offed. “No, no, Auntie Mae. Just keep an eye on him, would you?”

Auntie Mae glanced at Cor, who was threading the blankets through his fingers now and slowly starting to respond to a Gil hovering over his shoulder, and nodded. “Oh, we will. We’ll just grab Finn if anything happens over at the general store, yes?”

“That works. Thank you so much, Auntie Mae,” Harry said, and succumbed to the threats of homemade shortbread cookies. They were delicious.

“Is this racketeering? We’re giving them safety from the daemons and the Imperials in exchange for material goods?”

“I don’t think it counts if it’s for food and gossip,” Cor said, because he was a little shit. Good to know time and distance away from the former Crownsguard that had spooked him was getting him to unwind.

Gil snorted. “It’s not _just_ food and gossip,” he countered, but he sounded proud.

Harry ignored the conversation about the legitimacy of this sort-of-maybe racketeering to serve up another bowl of soup. The kids were well-behaved in line, as they always were. Some of the older ones were running through house rules again, which was nice. “Hey guys,” he interrupted, and reflexively smiled when eleven heads swiveled around to look at him. “Anybody wanna help me with the garden after?”

A lot of eager hands went up, some hurriedly shifting their bowls and utensils around to do so. Harry felt his smile smoothing out into something more genuine as he counted off the kids, taking the ones he knew who’d done it before and pairing them with the less experienced.

They passed the day in the garden, and it was beautiful. Cor and Gil were discussing something in the kitchen – Harry could hear it through the window that overlooked the garden – but he was determined not to let that bother him. He absorbed himself in teaching the newer kids with parents how to plant the tomato seeds and pack them in so that they could grow. He checked on the older ones who stayed in the Granica House with them more often than not, who were hard at work, faces set and determined to make the things grow that fed them all.

The oldest ones he didn’t see, but that was pretty regular. That crew had their own meetings run by Cor, and Harry had lost the battle to tell them what to do ages ago.

When the sun was starting to set he got them all cleaned up and inside in short order. Dinner went much the same way as lunch had gone, though afterwards the crowd started to slip away. Some went back home to parents who would no doubt send Harry food and clothing no matter how many times he tried to refuse them; others trudged downstairs to the basement that had been converted into a full dormitory. Bless Hermione for insisting that they all learn Extension Charms during the war.

He had just settled into the den with a book on his lap, Cor on the loveseat next to him, when he heard a crowd approaching; young, loud, and numerous. The front door opened, but sometimes they went to the sun room for their war plans – ah, no.

Harry looked up when a procession of the usual kids marched into the den. Not all of them were here – Aggie, Marnie, Ed, and Al were out running messages – but there was Dave, leading the charge of a handful of teenagers. They all acknowledged Harry in some way, but most turned to look at Cor. “We’ve got another one,” Dave told him.

Cor closed his book and stood, shucking off the ease of the evening like a coat to leave something more serious in its place.

“Don’t worry about Harry,” said Finn, the second to have sworn an oath once they’d started on this ridiculous business, “we all know he’s secretly a prince but he’s in hiding.”

“Excuse you,” Harry said, right on cue, because it still entertained them for some reason. He got to his own feet, because he knew that look in Cor’s eye. Another one, then?

“We keep his secret though because we like him.” Dave said it proudly, and a little bit in awe, and no matter what Harry had done over the last year it had stayed. It had grown, to Harry’s great embarrassment.

And then they’d started _this_ : a half-circle of compatriots who stood behind and in support of the newest kid who looked at Harry, barely scraping by as a mature adult and who was just another Hunter who happened to be running a pseudo-outpost in his pseudo-retirement, and thought _yes. I’m going to promise support and loyalty to him_.

“I promise,” the newest kid – Florence, she’d started coming around a few months ago and had never really left – pledged, “to keep your secrets like they are my secrets, to watch your and my sibling’s backs, to listen to what you tell me, and to stand by you always.”

It was a simple oath – simpler and less restrictive than the Retinue’s Oath that Cor had tried to swear to him, two years ago – but Harry knew for a fact that all of them who chose to swear it repeated what Dave and Cor and Gil had come up with until they knew it by heart.

“And I promise,” Harry said in reply, “to never let you go unprepared, and to never leave you behind.”

Dave looked disgruntled, like he did every time when Harry returned the pledge when Dave insisted he didn’t have to. Too bad; if he couldn’t stop the kids from going through with this, then he was going to at least promise them mutual support.

Florence blinked as Cor clapped his hands. “Welcome to the Secret Hunters,” he said without fanfare, and smiled when the semi-circle took the cue to welcome the newest member into their midst by cheering and pressing in on her in a group hug. “We’re glad to have you, Florence.”

“You should have told me,” Harry said to Dave over the heads of six kids eagerly dogpiling a seventh, “I would have made dinner.”

“’s exactly the reason why we didn’t tell you,” Dave replied easily enough, and grinned. Oh, he’d definitely picked that up from Ed and Al, hadn’t he. Ezma Auburnbrie was going to yell at him again. “Don’t worry about feeding us, we’ve got plans.”

Harry couldn’t help himself – he snorted. “I see how it is. Fine, have it your way, and leave your poor elders here while you young ones go off and have fun.”

“You’re twenty,” Peter pointed out, also right on cue. “You _are_ old! A fossil!”

“An absolute fossil,” Finn snickered, and as a group they dragged Florence off to do whatever it was the Secret Hunters did when they inducted another kid. Cor followed them out, though not before giving Harry an uncertain look.

He waved Cor off with a wry smile. “Let Sonora do all the talking, yeah?”

“I’ll keep my head down,” Cor agreed, and he was gone too, leaving just Harry and Gil behind.

“Congratulations,” Gil said, and Harry snorted again, ugly and loud.

“Don’t finish that sentence.” He gave in and scrubbed at his face, tried to stave off the pressure building behind his eyes. “Why, Gil?”

“Cor talked to all of them before they swore the Oath,” the spirit peaceably pointed out, and turned a page in his book. “Their vows are no less valid than if they swore to join your Retinue.”

“But why _me_ , Gil?” Harry shut his eyes and put his hands over his face, tried to think in the comforting dark. “I’m just a retired hunter. They don’t owe me anything, you know that. Everything I do is for free.”

“Because they want to,” Gil said. A book quietly closed; there was no rustle of clothing when a spirit didn’t really wear clothing, but Gil made a deliberate scuffing noise against the floor before he put his hand on Harry’s shoulder. “You heard Mae. They love you.”

“For some reason,” Harry choked out, and took in a shaky breath. “God, Gil. They’re so young.” So young and yet they knew what they wanted to do with their lives, which was to, apparently, help Harry on his insane quest to keep the civilians safe and to outsmart the Niffs and take care of the region and clear out the daemons and look after the orphans who were left behind in the violence of the war.

“And yet they’re all very capable. What do you think I am, chopped liver?”

“Oh no, you’ve grown too powerful.” Despite himself, Harry laughed. “You’re talking like one of us, Gil.”

And if Harry’s laugh was wet then Gil didn’t say anything, bless him, just squeezed his shoulder and harrumphed. “Bold words from the man that they called a fossil.”

“If I’m a fossil, then what’re you? Dirt?”

“Titan’s meteorite, obviously.” Gil was still stuck behind that mask, in the armor he had worn when he’d died, but he was at good expressing himself through vocal tones only. He softened when he asked, “You know Cor is turning eighteen next year.”

“ _Please_ don’t remind me,” Harry said on auto-pilot, because that was a terrifying thought, too. Cor was turning eighteen, and the grace period he’d bought for himself would end then, because there was no universe in which Cor would not pledge the Retinue’s Oath to him as soon as he was able to. If Harry were especially unlucky then the rest of the kids would join him; everyone, from Dave to Finn to the formerly latest-sworn Ken. Even Florence would; Cor had made that part of the questions, during the screening process.

But he’d taken Harry’s concerns into account, too – there was a reason part of the Secret Hunter’s vow was listening to what Harry said, not following orders.

 _Trust in us_ , he could hear Ron saying. _Trust that we know what we_ _want_. He’d made the same face that Cor did, too, when he’d thought Harry was being stubborn. Hermione had always just glared, her ire plain to see.

And what could Harry do in the face of such faith, other than try and return it as best he could?

The kids tumbled back in shortly after midnight, Cor tucked carefully in the middle and hidden among blond and dark and auburn hair. Mixed in with them as if she’d never left was Aggie. She didn’t even seem to feel the bruise and cuts on her face, instead waving off the field-potion Harry had offered, and when the others had left for their bunks she fell into the parade rest that the Secret Hunters had all apparently learned from Cor.

Harry knew when he was looking at a losing fight and chose to capitulate gracefully. “Any news?”

“Just the one.” Aggie flashed him a bright smile, quicksilver and bold. “You were right. They’re still lookin’ for Cor. What did you want to do?”

The confirmation made his blood boil, but this, right here, was his favorite part of the day: “Continue to mess with ‘em, Aggie. Let the others know, too.”

“You got it, boss. You want sightings from here to Leide again?”

“Let’s take it a step further,” Harry mused, and ran his hand over the map on the kitchen table. “Didn’t Quintus and Odin want to take a beach trip?”

“They did. I’ll send ‘em to the Quay, then. We’ll need a few more of those appearence-changing potions – Marnie used up all of hers keeping her head down in Cavaugh.”

“I just brewed a new batch, have Marnie swing by.” Quintus and Odin swapping out with Ed and Al to head out to southern Duscae would split the Crownsguard’s attention between them and the one here in Cleigne. Marnie was going to be skidding uncomfortably close to the Niflheim border, but if Harry was uncomfortable with it then Regis Lucis Caelum was going to have a heart attack when he heard someone had seen Cor Leonis in that area.

Let them feel fear in their hearts of the boy that they turned into a weapon, he thought as he shooed Aggie off to bed. Let them feel the weight of their sins upon their shoulders, while the real Cor slept easy under Harry’s roof.

He was indebted to the kids most of all, really. He’d taken Gil’s pointed looks and bought the house outright instead of just renting it when the spirit had caught him the third time he’d let in the orphan who dug up the courage to knock on his door for the rumored hot meal, blanket, and a quiet place to sleep for the night.

But not just the kids. The civilians here in Ravatogh all played dumb when the Crownsguard swept by, and so did the people in Old Lestallum who let him trade his potions and hi-potions for groceries and supplies, and the smaller communities of refugees scattered throughout Steyliff and Greyshire and Cape Caem.

He knew people had their suspicions, but they still thought he was a missing magic user who was here to take care of the civilians in this war and they had kept their mouths shut; even better, they were so grateful for Cor Granica’s daemon-slaying skills that they forgot to ask about Cor Leonis.

At least, he hoped they thought that. Auntie Mae just smiled whenever Harry asked what people thought of them.

He put together the grab bag for Marnie, tossing in the makeshift Polyjuice Potion he’d been able to cobble together out of the herbs here and his own magic, along with other odds and ends and goodies, and then turned to his map. He knew he was just running away from his problems, but sue him. Everyone who joined the Secret Hunters was someone who passed Dave’s screening, as young as they were, as young as _Dave_ was; the oldest was Cor at seventeen.

He couldn’t leave this entire thing to them, no matter how much they’d protest him taking to the field himself. Retirement had been nice, it _still_ was nice, but it’d been weeks since he’d cleared out the daemons. They were getting unnervingly close to their small settlement in Ravatogh.

Not just daemons, either, but if he let Gil or Cor suspect anything the both of them would sit on him until the opportunity had passed. And this was one opportunity that wouldn’t be coming around again.

“Can you distract the cashier at Verinas Mart?” he asked Gil, and the spirit grumbled as he stepped out of his corner hiding spot.

“Of course,” he said, and he didn’t sound like he was suspecting anything. Good; Harry wouldn’t have to ask Death to delay him, then.

Really, everyone in this house were such worry warts.

Cor would be getting up at dawn to lead warmups and morning training – everyone who wanted to learn how to fight was taught, and his classes were the most popular thing for the kids to do before noon, especially when Gil ran the sparring sessions for the Secret Hunters that all the kids knew existed but no one talked about – so he didn’t actually have much time. But he had enough, to wipe out the daemons threatening Ravatogh and Greyshire and Steyliff, and then turn his attention to the real event of the night.

Harry had tapped Fort Vaullerey’s communications months ago, and they hadn’t found the leak yet – mostly because he hadn’t actually acted on the information yet. He’d been saving it for the perfect opportunity, which he was now thankful for; the lines had been alight with chatter for days now, talking about the impending arrival of a top military researcher who wanted to use their fort as the staging point for a field test of new magitek.

A top military researcher named Besithia.

Harry took the Cloak of Invisibility with him and smiled at Death as they walked into the night. Apparation still came easily to him, even though he couldn’t afford to use it for anything long-distance in public since he’d convinced Auntie Mae it was just a version of the Lucis Caelum’s warping abilities.

Which it was, technically. Death hadn’t been any clearer about his exact relations to the Lucis Caelum, but he was not the first transdimensional traveler. More likely than not a Caelum had arrived in his original world and settled down and had kids, and now here Harry stood, a legacy of two wildly different places with wildly different values.

With the Cloak and his own magic, it was easy to sneak into the Fort, access the Imperial airstrip and all their lovely dropships, and sneak back out. It was like any mission he’d run during the Wizarding War, and it was good to know that Harry still had it, in case he needed it.

He’d finished early, too, so Harry took the opportunity to Apparate over to Leide to check on the tiny outposts there. Not all of the kids who passed through the Granica House for food and shelter stayed to discover that the Secret Hunters existed and were headhunting; some of them went straight to the Hunters and signed on with them as soon as they were old enough.

Harry checked in on the ones he knew were working at the outposts: Longwythe needed more food supplies which he was able to produce from his bottomless bags, snuck onto his belt as charms. Prairie needed weapons, which he left as an anonymous package for Veronica, who would know what to do with it.

He had just arrived in Hammerhead, walking into town without the Cloak to see what these new people were up to, when someone behind him said, “So you’re the one that all of Cleigne is making a fuss about.”

In front of him Death nodded, confirming his suspicion. Harry had heard from Cor that Cid Sophiar had left Prince Regis’s Retinue to set up shop in Leide. A man after his own heart, if he’d called the Lucis royals out on their bullshit about leaving the rest of their own damn country to the wolves. According to Cor and confirmed by local rumor, Sophiar had cut all ties with the Crown City and didn’t talk to anyone there.

But Harry had not survived this long by being careless. He didn’t turn around as he tossed back, “Who now?”

“You have a Tenebraean accent,” Sophiar said. He sounded thoughtful.

Harry allowed himself a smile when he channeled Auntie Mae and replied, “Not really, darlin’.”

“And Cleigne. Which would make sense.” Sophiar made shuffling noises like he was about to loop around and see Harry’s face, which wouldn’t do.

“I know ya don’ speak with them anymore,” Harry said, and allowed himself a smirk when he heard Sophiar stop dead in his tracks. “Rumor has it ya had a fallin’ out? But if ya ever see ‘em again, pass on a message fer me.”

 _Don’t be so dramatic, Harry,_ he could hear Gil saying, but the moment was too perfect. Harry turned his head just enough to look over his shoulder and stare Sophiar in the eye, and was pleased to see the man’s jaw hanging open. At almost fifty, he had a head full of salt-and-pepper hair; no doubt there would be more white after tonight.

Not that it was Harry’s problem. “Their sins reach far and wide,” he said, and Death helped him out by making him go translucent under the anti-daemon night lights and causing his voice to warp into something that hurt to hear. “The blood on the hands of those who would rule are too great to be washed clean. They have made their bed; now they must lie in it. Stay out of Cleigne.”

And then he Apparated away to the sound of Death chuckling, audible to the mortals for once, the haunting of a graveyard with bones rattling in their coffins.

Niflheim never acknowledged it, but it was all over the underground radio stations coming out of the Empire the next day: Verstael Besithia, up and coming bright mind of the Empire, reportedly killed when his dropship exploded on the way back from a military field test. All of the research that he’d brought burned with him, and two days later, his research laboratory at the First Magitek Production Facility burned down when an experiment was left unsupervised.

Harry sat in his kitchen and took a sip of his hot chocolate and watched Cor correct the self-defense forms of the new kids who’d found the Granica House in its backyard, and he smiled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just trust me. I like Prompto the sunshine chocobo boy; he’ll appear in the series later.
> 
> The Secret Hunters are a group of kids that Harry took in and fed and expected nothing from, who have nothing left to return to (thanks, centuries-long war). They’d heard of Cor Granica, and they’d heard of Cor the Immortal who walked out of the death trap of Taelpar Crag alive, and they could put two and two together and get four. Ezma Auburnbrie thinks that her son is just the leader of his friend group, and that the Granicas are very skilled Hunters who are starting to settle down. Dave is actually the Second-in-Command of the Secret Hunters; Cor leads them.
> 
> They’re called the Secret Hunters because they’re all letting Harry continue to claim he’s _just_ a hunter. :D


	4. Year Four (M.E. 729)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harry finds his opportunity to assassinate the Emperor of Niflheim and takes it. It’s as good a coronation gift as ever for a relative he vaguely hates. And then, like true relatives, they show up when he doesn’t expect them nor want them to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next fic in the series _I never shook my shadow_ chronologically happens between chapters three and four of _this_ fic, but you can read that before or after and be just fine.

“Are you sure you don’t want to attend the coronation?”

Harry’s steps slowed. He’d not yet crossed the corner into the kitchen, but he didn’t need to in order to hear Cor’s reply: “No, it’s fine. It’ll be all over the news anyway.”

“Harry would understand,” Gil said, and his voice was not unkind. “You were sworn to Prince Regis first, and you have not seen him in four years.”

“It’s better this way.” Cor sounded at peace. Harry bit the inside of his cheek and willed himself to remain instead of walking away. “Reggie’s gonna be a proper king now, the gods rest King Mors’s soul, and he doesn’t need a distraction. Especially since Harry wants to stay here.”

“You don’t want him to claim his birthright.”

“Reggie can’t extend the wall to what it was in King Mors’s youth,” said Cor, and he was all factual about it. “The people of Cleigne still need us. And even if they didn’t, sooner or later the Crownsguard they send out to investigate rumors will get lucky.”

Because it had been four years and counting, and the Crownsguard – even the retired ones out here in the middle of nowhere-Cleigne – were still quietly asking after Cor Leonis. Harry would applaud the tenacity if he weren’t pissed off about it.

“Lucis does not have an heir for Prince Regis right now,” Gil pointed out, because four years did not change what he had been for two thousand: a Shield of the line of Lucis Caelum. “They would welcome Harry with open arms if he were to reveal himself, instead of with hostility.”

Harry didn’t need to hear the rest of this. He stepped back, as quietly as he had come, and left.

Death was waiting for him when he settled himself on the roof. “What is it?” Harry asked, staring at the outline of the Rock of Ravatogh against the midday sky.

AN OPPORTUNITY, Death replied. FOR A FIELD TRIP. WILL YOU JOIN ME?

There was only one ‘field trip’ that Harry had been waiting for. He was standing before he realized it, adrenalin raising the corners of his lips into a smile. “Of course.”

In hindsight, maybe Harry should have planned it out better. He’d certainly come back to enough panic in the house from his impromptu field trip that it would be a miracle if Cor or Gil or any of the Secret Hunters let him out of their sights before they all went gray.

But then again, he got to assassinate the Emperor of Niflheim and his cabinet of war-hungry generals, so that was nice. Not that it would help the coming unrest any, but at least it would stop at least one of the countries from aggressive military action. For a land at war for which the entirety of its citizens desperately wanted to be over, sometimes that was all things needed.

And hey, there was evidence that Niflheim had been planning on using the opening of the King of Lucis dying in order to press further into Cleigne. Harry took that kind of thing personally these days, for obvious reasons. 

Of course, they did not account for the fact that apparently, the Lucis Caelum family talked to this universe’s version of gods.

Harry would have appreciated a heads-up, but not even Death had known about it until it was almost too late. The best he could do was meet them on neutral ground – a haven nearby, far enough away that they were outside the shadow of the Rock of Ravatogh, close enough that Auntie Mae and the rest of the kids who Cor had argued should remain behind as backup were on hand.

He set his conditions for their meeting as though this was a parley: each person bringing only two others to the haven. If there was even a hint of any others, the whole thing was off. The meeting would last only before, during, and after lunch (ingredients brought split between parties, as Hermione had taught him) after which both sides were free to leave.

“I told Sophiar to tell them,” Harry sighed as they were packing up the Granica House and sweeping away every trace of the children. Just in case. “Not to come to Cleigne. And what do they do? They come to Cleigne.”

“You talked to _Cid_?” Cor did not yelp, but the glare he sent Harry’s way was just like Ron’s. He didn’t miss the good old days of the war, but he did miss his friends. What he wouldn’t give to have them here and by his side – but that wasn’t fair. They were busy rebuilding an entire society from the ground-up.

WHEN THEY ARE READY, Death reminded him, voice as mild as spring rain.

Harry waved it off to answer Cor. “Yeah, I did. Which means he told them and they ignored him, or Sophiar didn’t tell them anything.”

“It’s likely the latter,” Cor said. “He was… he was very angry when Reggie didn’t petition his father about the Wall.”

Harry knew for himself that powering magic on the level of a Protego around an entire country was ridiculous – he’d traveled Cleigne and Duscae and Leide over the years, with and without Cor and Gil and the others tagging along at his heels. He’d seen for himself the sheer breadth of the land that still made him stare, the horizon that just stretched out and onward.

But that didn’t mean you could just leave them out here to die.

The meeting which Harry would have been happy to never have, ever, started off just fine. There wasn’t too much staring at his face or his hair, and they got through the initial introductions without Cor stabbing anybody or the Prince’s two bodyguards getting huffy and insulted.

And then the short one – Drautos – had the guts to mutter under his breath, “Guess you couldn’t go off and die like a good mutt.”

He felt his expression freeze on his face. “Pardon?” he asked, voice serene, because if he could keep his temper through Ed and Al blowing up the garden shed then he could be put-together enough for this.

Drautos set his jaw. “You heard me.”

Oh, but this wasn’t even the worst of it. Harry kept a finger on the pulse of the rumor mill by necessity. He knew what the Crownsguard opinion of Cor Leonis was, honorably discharged but running around while not under any other jurisdiction. Most thought he’d gone and cracked; the more popular consensus was that he’d been picked up by Nifflheim or some other anti-royal faction, because what kind of Crownsguard left the service in the middle of a war?

Harry could see out of the corner of his eye that Cor’s knuckles were whitening around his sword’s handle. Clarus bloody Amicitia looked like he agreed with Titus Drautos, and Regis Lucis Caelum said nothing, just watched with bright blue eyes. Ah.

Prince Regis Lucis Caelum of the royal line of Insomnia had replaced Cor with yet another orphan to fight in his place, to bloody his hands in his place, to die in his place. Drautos was just a kid. There were more worthy souls to weigh in judgement, and here was one of them.

“Do you collect orphans like knives?” Harry hissed at the little prince. He knew Fiendfyre was flickering at his feet, his hair was rising with static electricity, his eyes were glowing an unholy green. He did not care. “You use them and then discard them when they are no longer of use?”

“You are out of line,” Clarus Amictia rumbled, and stepped forward as though he were about to do something about it. He was stopped by Gilgamesh’s six-foot-ten of armor and bristling steel.

“Hold your tongue,” the First Shield said, and it was not a suggestion.

“Alright.” Somehow, Cor was currently the most level-headed out of all of them. Harry breathed deep to fill his lungs with air and shoved down the Fiendfyre to a manageable level. “Let’s start that over again, why don’t we? Prince Regis, sir, this is Harry Potter. He can do magic, and he’s related, if distantly, to the Lucis Caelum.”

“Potter?” Amicitia frowned. “There’s no records of a Lucis Caelum in hiding who’s ever used that name.”

Harry wouldn’t do them the disservice of asking how they knew he was related to the Caelum bloodline. Regis Lucis Caelum’s eyes had flicked downwards at the first hint of ‘fyre, and the kings and queens of Insominia were known for their own control of elemental magic.

No, the man just asked the next most obvious question to ask a _total stranger_ instead: “How do you have magic if you’ve never been presented to the Crystal?”

Harry didn’t fight the urge to snort. “The world’s bigger than just magic based off your Crystal,” he said, and wiggled his fingers. Lumos lit them, and the men in front of him balked. Ah, that never got old.

“The magic comes from the gods,” Amicitia bit out. He looked as though he’d been hit in the back of the head with a shovel.

AND WHAT DO YOU THINK I AM? said Death.

Lucis Caelum and Amicitia did a double-take hard enough to crack necks. Drautos just looked up and paled. Harry wondered what they saw – to him, Death was a skeleton under a black cloak and with a scythe, and apparently that’s all it had ever looked like to Cor and Gilgamesh, but human-entity perception could be a little finnicky.

HELLO, Death said belatedly. AND NO, I’M NOT THE REASON WHY DEAR HARRY HAS MAGIC.

Amicitia set his jaw. “Death calls you _dear Harry_ ,” he said slowly.

Harry didn’t see what that had to do with anything, but he was willing to humor the man. “Yeah?”

Clarus Amicitia, one hundred and thirteenth of the line of Shields, swallowed harshly. “You know that the royal crest is in honor of Death.”

“So?”

Amicitia gave Cor a side-eye. “All signs point to him being a Lucis Caelum.”

Cor bared his teeth, but Harry knew him. That was a smile. “You thought I made a mistake?”

“It’s too convenient. You disappear for four years, with only the occasional sighting like some kind of – of _ghost_ , we write you off as MIA, and you come back with a long-lost son of the bloodline to be heir apparent to all of Lucis?”

Even Harry could admit it didn’t look good from the outside. Cor was honorably discharged from the King and Prince’s service and then he went and found another person to swear himself to; someone who looked like a Lucis Caelum but didn’t claim the name.

But what Harry couldn’t get was the fact that they looked at him like they thought he was some power-hungry noble. “What the fuck are you talking about. We just wanted a house and to help out the neighbors.”

Amicitia squinted. Most of the color had returned to his face, though he did glance at Gilgamesh and Death from time to time. “You _run_ the town.”

“I don’t, that’s Auntie Mae,” Harry replied, mostly on autopilot, because it was true. And then he blinked, which was his mistake.

“You’re the one who’s been supplying all of outer Lucis,” Regis Lucis Caelum breathed. It was the first he spoke at all – he hadn’t done his own introductions, the arrogant bastard. Or was it just royal protocol?

“I’m retired,” Harry replied automatically, the way he did any time Ezma’s Hunters tried to wrangle him out of retirement for ‘one last hunt.’

“Yeah,” Amicitia snorted, “and I’m a chocobo.”

Oh, the man had walked himself into that one. “I don’t know,” Harry drawled, tucking his hands into his pockets and eyeing Amicitia from head to toe. “I think you’d make a pretty good one.”

And before Amicitia could say anything else, Harry turned him into a chocobo. A pink one, just for the hell of it.

They broke for lunch after Harry turned Clarus back, because as the man who would be king in a week, Regis wasn’t going to be hanging around Ravatogh forever.

Cor wanted to handle Drautos himself – Harry couldn’t understand why, though Gil murmured to him that he wanted to pass on knowledge that Drautos would need about Regis since Cor was sworn to Harry now, and Harry didn’t need this further proof that Cor really was too good for any of this shite – so it was that the rest of them who sat in silence.

Well, at least Death was gone from the rest of mortal sight, too entertained by these humans to risk not being able to eavesdrop when they thought it was gone and thus could actually start cursing.

Throughout it, Regis kept an unnervingly close eye on Cor. He wasn’t the only one – Drautos and Amicitia were doing it too – but he was the one that Harry was most worried about. He was the one that had the most potential to hurt Cor, even unintentionally.

But it wasn’t until lunch was over that he broke his silence.

“How did you do it?”

Harry looked away from the bickering Granica and Drautos to stare at Regis. “What?”

The man in question swallowed hard, the first tell he’d given away all night. “It didn’t matter if it was a bad order, or a poor plan, or just something that rubbed at him wrong. Cor would growl and hiss, but he’d never talk back. He’d always just… accept it.”

“He’s a doormat,” Amicitia added. “But now he’s not. How did you do it?”

Harry couldn’t help it – he laughed. “You think he’s a _doormat_?” Cor was the most stubborn bastard that Harry had ever seen. “He was deferring to you, as a liege man to a liege lord. A group member to a group leader. A friend to a friend.”

That was one thing that Luna had taught him, at least. Just because someone agreed with you and let you do what you want most of the time didn’t mean that they did that all the time. Luna had boundaries that she did not let other people cross, as few as they were and covered in metaphorical flowers and disguised by Wrackspurts. You could taunt those boundaries, you could skirt uncomfortably close to them, and all she’d do was smile.

But cross them and there would be hell to pay, and you would be thanking Luna afterwards.

Regis had turned back to look at Cor with something like – Harry squinted. It reminded him of Hermione’s face when she’d seen her Patronus for the first time, Luna’s when she was with the thestrals. Awe, and delight, and the weary eyes that came with something that was a double-edged sword.

“He was never as vibrant,” the man muttered, watching the bickering now simmered down to simple hatred between contemporaries. “It was always yes sir, no sir, whenever we made camp. We got him to open up a little, out in the wilds, but after we were called back home and my father pulled back the Wall…”

Regis said nothing else. Harry didn’t need Legilimency to know what he was thinking. He had met Cor in the Tempering Grounds, years ago, and the boy then had reminded Harry so much of the younger Dumbledore’s Army students, of his own friends and of his own eyes in the mirror.

Just one more sin to pile on Regis’s shoulders. Just one more poorly-made decision.

That observation seemed to be the thing that Regis had been waiting for, though, because soon after he promised that they would leave Harry alone. Had been threatened into it, really, when Harry had put his foot down and said he wouldn’t come to Insomnia, and while Amicitia had protested about Lucis Caelums and the need to be kept safe, and Drautos had bristled on his liege lord’s behalf, Regis Lucis Caelum had simply held up a hand and the rest of them had shut up.

Instead he asked, with the bearing of a prince trained for war, “What are you planning to do now?” Aggression and suspicion – the need to make a liability secure – burned steadily in his eyes.

Harry was prepared for this. The Secret Hunters asked him the same question every night, in words or in deeds or in behavior, and it had taken him a while but with the emperor dead, there was finally an opening. “Niflheim is an empire that’s been conquering for _years_ , and now that they’ve shown weakness everyone wants a piece. Accordo, Altissia - hell, even Tenebrae, probably.”

He could just imagine the circling vultures and felt the impending headache. Harry pressed on anyway. “And what happens to the Imperial citizens? They bled their own dry. War isn’t fought in a vacuum, you know. Just because they weren’t soldiers doesn’t mean they didn’t suffer.”

“Not only that, but Niflheim does not have a crown heir,” Gil pointed out, in the middle of sharpening his sword. That had brought more than a little hissing from Drautos, but Gil was a stubborn ghost who gave no shits. “There will be likely be a civil war over the exact person to next ascend the throne.”

“I’m staying out here,” Harry added, and raised an eyebrow when Regis opened his mouth to protest. Amicitia didn’t have as much self-control, but he shut up when Regis elbowed him right in the ribs. “You said you’re royalty? Well, it’s just _stupid_ to put all your eggs in one basket – you might have your fancy Wall but it’s not a guarantee against dying, you know. And the people here need me.”

“Just the people here?” Regis asked, and there was steel in his voice, no confusion or hesitation at being caught flat-footed. Right, royal heir training or whatever the hell it was people got in order to make them kings and queens and royalty. Harry had seen too much to let a twenty-something with a crown push him around, though.

“Not just Cleigne. Duscae needs help, and so does Leide. When your father pulled back the Wall he stranded more than half of his people in lands that were overrun by the Niffs. Occupying forces are hardly lenient nor kind to anyone.”

Regis flinched. Good. He was king now, and the son inherited the boons and the sins of the father in equal measure.

They packed up the haven after lunch in silence. Soon enough it was just as they had found it, and the runes were glowing blue and humming gently underfoot. Harry topped off the protective spells almost absentmindedly – he’d cleared out most, if not all, of the daemons in the vicinity, but it never hurt and his magic had brought a little something extra to the usual haven wards over the years. The Secret Hunters used these as staging grounds, too, which was a reason in and of itself.

And wasn’t that just the sticking point. Drautos followed Regis around like Cor did Harry, or even Dave did Cor.

What was it that one of the books Hermione made them read had said? _You are forever responsible for the things that you have tamed._

Cor was not an animal; he was human. So was Dave. So were all of the Secret Hunters. But Cor had been young and he had been dependent on the military’s structure and he had staked his life and honor and purpose and sense of self on Regis, only to be rejected. The Secret Hunters hadn’t been military, but they had been orphans and children, too, that Harry had took in and then taught how to fight.

He’d taught them how to fight because the alternative was death, but did that make him any better? Did that give him stable ground upon which to judge Regis?

Harry’s own damning evidence aside, that first year Cor had thrown himself at the first chance he got to have something like what he’d had before, and damn the consequences of what could have happened if that Lucis Caelum hadn’t been Harry.

Regis and his two were getting ready to leave. Harry watched them pack and Drautos, as young as he was, lack Amicitia’s strict discipline that kept him from glancing at the Crownsguard backup, and thought. Regis wasn’t altogether a bad prince. A bad person, maybe. But war made for dirty business, and the weight of the crown was heavy.

It did not excuse him, but perhaps it explained him.

“You should talk to Sophiar,” Harry said, before he left. “You never know what’s going to happen, Regis. Trust me. Forgive and be forgiven before it’s too late.”

And then he booted them all out of the haven, because the sun was high in the sky and there weren’t any daemons in the area, they’d make good time on their way back just fine.

Not to mention the Crownsguard that Lucis Caelum had snuck along with him had started creeping a little too close for Harry’s sense of boundaries to be happy with.

  
  


The coronation happened the week after. It was televised all over Lucis, and Insomnia threw a week-long festival for their newly crowned king that was open for all Lucian citizens to come and take part in.

Harry spent the week slowly shoring up Cleigne’s defenses, then Duscae and Leide. There was movement in the far reaches of Gralea, and though the Emperor was dead Harry had killed only the top officers of the war cabinet, and the hastily promoted lower officers were power-hungry. It was only a matter of time until they marched out to their territories and protectorates in an effort to bring back some form of stability, and Harry knew for a fact that Accordo would fight back, and so would Tenebrae, and Lucis would only help them.

Wars never ended cleanly or within months, much less that of an empire that had been expanding for years. Harry would be ready. There was too much at stake to not be.

Only a few days after the coronation, a letter wended its way through Crownsguard contacts in Leide and Duscae before finally making its way to the retired Crownsguard officer now working in Verinas Mart, who passed it onto Auntie Mae. It was a matte black envelope, sealed with the crest of the Lucis Caelum, addressed to _His Royal Highness Harry James Potter of the Lucis Caelum, Protector of the West and Prince of Lucis, Duke of Duscae, Leide, and Cleigne, Lord of Insomnia and All Her Peoples._

“Oh, you bastard.”

“I think,” Dave said, still grinning ever since he’d couriered this damn letter from Auntie Mae to Harry, “he threw all the titles he could at you.”

Harry pointed at Dave. “Not another word from you.”

Dave was still snickering, though, when Harry opened up the letter. _To my cousin Harry: the paperwork is already through._

Oh, that _bastard._

_I can’t convince you home yet, so I’ll give you the next best thing: protection. Death and magic both confirmed you’re family, and I’ll be damned before I let your position weaken before the power-hungry nobles of my court. I could tell that you’re a man who hates titles, but I’m afraid they’re a necessary evil. No one knows where you are, only that you’re still in hiding, but those on my inner council will know that the rumors of a rogue Lucis Caelum in the outer regions of Lucis are true._

_We only met for a few hours but I appreciated all of which I saw from you – though your tongue was sharp, I admit that I’m looking forward to seeing you flay some of my outer council nobles. Don’t be a stranger._

_Take care of Cor for me._

That was it. The back was blank. It was signed _Sincerely and with the greatest fondness, Regis._ No last name, no titles, no long-winded explanations.

Harry read through it again, then again for a third time. Then he carefully folded it and slipped it back into the envelope it had arrived in, and when Dave shifted uncertainly on his feet, finally managed to dredge up a smile. “Distant relatives, am I right?”

Dave smiled, bright and mischievous. “They’re just awful, aren’t they?”

“Yeah.” Harry gave the matte black envelope one last glance before he turned to put it away. “Now come on, what was it you were saying was going on with Altissia?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I spent way too long trying to figure out the titles that Regis could throw at a technical heir presumptive who no one knows about and has question marks all over the family tree, but with enough weight that Harry could out-rank all the stuffy nobles on his council. 
> 
> The quote _You are forever responsible_ is slightly rephrased from a line in the book _The Little Prince_.
> 
> If you want to see more, don't forget to subscribe to the series itself - there's four more fics to come! <3

**Author's Note:**

> This story is part of the [LLF Comment Project](https://longlivefeedback.tumblr.com/llfcommentproject), which was created to improve communication between readers and authors. This author invites and appreciates feedback, including:
> 
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